UKI

22 May 2014, 20:00 - 23:00

Shu Lea Cheang

UKI Viral Love is the sequel to Shu Lea Cheang’s acclaimed cyberpunk movie I.K.U., which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2000.

Conceived in two parts—both viral performance and game—the film tells the story of coders working for the Internet porn enterprise, GENOM Corp., dispatched to collect data on the human orgasm for a marketing study on consumption and mobile phone plug-ins. Following a large-scale internet crash, the coders find themselves stuck in an e-trashscape, where, alongside hackers and networkers, they are forced to scavenge the techno-waste. Amidst the rubble of wires, cables, boards and computers, the now-defunct coders seek the parts and codes that will bring them back to life. As a performance, UKI Viral Love takes the form of a hyper-jam session: a viral journey with live processed cinematic sequences created using a viral PD (Pure Data) patch and a troupe of coders, audio/video artists, and noise musicians from Montreal.